Last week, I went to NetSci, the big yearly network science conference. Hosted at Northwestern University this year, I had a great time. But in addition to enjoying the conference itself, this year I got to attend two events that bookended my time at the conference.
Early in the week, I went to one of the satellite workshops entitled Networks: the bet365体育赛事 of bet365体育赛事 and Innovation, and at the end of the week I went to the second annual Altmetrics workshop.
And they were both great! Both touched on similar topics: how to quantify and measure scientific progress.
The first conference explored the science of science, also known as scientometrics. While one can examine science in many different ways, there is a great deal of power in using a network methodology. As I wrote about before, you can use network to understand relationships between individuals and ideas, and see how science grows and changes.
And networks were used to wonderful effect! For example, in one presentation, Peter Mucha showed how to use the academic genealogy of mathematicians in order to determine institutional prestige (article as pdf):
The network of relationships between adviser and student (and accompanying institutions) allows us to determine how universities should be ordered.
Many other research results were detailed, from other ways to examine academic genealogy to how to determine what your next research project should be. It was great.
And what of the second workshop?
Altmetrics, as I've discussed before, is a movement that aims to explore the many different ways to measure scientific contributions. Whether it's measuring how papers get tweeted or blogged about, or creating mechanisms to measure how data are shared, or even measuring helpfulness, we are sorely in need of new ways to measure contributions to the scientific endeavor.
This year's altmetrics workshop gathered together people from academia, the startup world, the publishing industry, and non-profits together to figure out how this new exciting world is going to work. The upshot is we don't know yet, but there are a lot of really exciting things going on. Run by Jason Priem, a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, and one of the authors of the altmetrics manifesto (he coined the word), lots happened throughout the day.
Participants demoed their software, such as Mendeley,total-impact, and Altmetric (for a complete list, go here), and discussed everything from online usage to reproducibility in science. Ultimately, this workshop demonstrated that the altmetrics community is growing rapidly, and including ideas from many different fields and types of thinking.
Top Image: Mo Costandi/Flickr/CC
